Certain authorities, such as state highway administrations, require that certain vehicles such as oversized or overweight trucks obtain a permit to travel within their jurisdictions. In determining whether such a vehicle should be granted a permit for a given requested route, the authorities implement a largely manual process that requires routing technicians to study the physical characteristics of the vehicle being permitted and then manually determine whether the vehicle in question is acceptable for the requested route. The technicians must also compute permit fees, in accordance with state regulations, that are based on physical vehicle characteristics and registration aspects of the vehicle being permitted, and the distance of the requested route.
This manual routing process is therefore time-consuming and prone to human error. Moreover, a staff of routing technicians together must repeat this permitting process over and over, often for the same routes, in connection with many different vehicles. Such a process has thus always been extremely inefficient and costly.
To aid the technicians and the users requesting the permits, systems having access to a large database of route segments in the form of a base map have been developed. This data may be displayed in the form of a graphical map allowing a travel origin and destination to be selected, with the software determining the best route(s) based certain criteria.
However, such base map routing systems have shortcomings. For example, multiple route segments must be exhaustively combined to determine a single traversable route.
In addition, such systems require a complete database of roads and all related route information to operate properly and accurately. Such complete information is often either not available or subject to change. Conventional routing systems do not typically account for the characteristics of the vehicle that will be traversing a route. Conventional routing systems also do not account for the frequency of use of routes in making routing decisions.